Johann Strauss I: Eisenbahn-Lust Waltz (Railway Delight Waltz), 1836
The elder Johann Strauss’s Eisenbahn-Lust celebrated the opening of the first public railway line out of Vienna, to Breclav (now Břeclav, in the Czech Republic). It begins – and sort of ends – with steam locomotive sounds and is the first of several railway pieces by members of the Strauss family, keen as they were to cash in on this fast-expanding industry.
Glinka: Travelling Song (The Train Song), 1840
Described by the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as “probably the first ever railway song”, Glinka’s express Travelling Song is a setting of a text by his friend Nestor Kukolnik. It contains such lines as “The train shoots forward and speeds through the countryside / freer than the wind .” The music is suitably clickety-click.
Alkan: Le Chemin de Fer, 1844
Charles Alkan was a friend of Chopin and Liszt who composed piano music of considerable technical complexity and adventurousness. An example of this (though hardly the greatest) is Le Chemin de Fer, a five-minute moto perpetuo evoking what was then an entirely new speed.
Berlioz: Le Chant des Chemins de Fer, 1846
Berlioz’s grand cantata for tenor and six-part chorus was commissioned by the Chemin de Fer du Nord to mark the opening of the Paris to Lille and Brussels railway line in June 1846. Having just undertaken an arduous European tour largely by stagecoach, Berlioz was an enthusiastic advocate of train travel and jumped at the chance, completing the work in a few days. It was performed in 1975 at a concert in the Royal Albert Hall celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and in 1994 at the launch ceremony of the Eurostar service.
Dvořák: Humoresque No 7, 1894
Dvořák was, literally, a trainspotter: he loved nothing more than visiting the Franz-Josef Station in Prague and loved chatting with locomotive engineers. Although he never expressed this passion in music, in the 1930s the tune of his popular Humoresque No 7 became the setting of a mildly scatological verse about one of the more potentially uncomfortable restrictions of train travel: “Passengers will please refrain from flushing toilets while the train is standing in the station.”
Grainger: Arrival Platform Humlet, 1908
Percy Grainger adored travelling by train, and during journeys loved to spread his manuscripts out and compose. In his own words, Arrival Platform Humlet (Humlet being a little ditty to hum) derived from: “awaiting the arrival of a belated train bringing one’s sweetheart from foreign parts: great fun! The sort of thing one hums to oneself as an accompaniment to one’s tramping feet as one happily, excitedly, paces up and down the arrival platform.” It was said to have been composed at London’s Liverpool Street and Victoria Stations in 1908.
Ives: From Hanover Square North, 1915-19, rev circa 1929
On 7 May 1915, the day the Lusitania was sunk by a German torpedo at the cost of more than 1,000 lives, Charles Ives was standing on an elevated railway platform listening to a barrel organ playing the song In the Sweet By-and-By. One by one, everyone in the station joined in. Ives recorded this extraordinary collective experience in From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose. Ives’s The Celestial Railroad, however, is arguably a more genuine piece of train music. The work was inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fantastical short story in which a passenger boards a supposedly heaven-bound train.
Honegger: Pacific 231, 1923
“I have always loved locomotives passionately,” said Arthur Honegger. “For me they are living creatures, and I love them as others love women or horses.” The most famous railway-related piece was the result, although Honegger denied it was descriptive music. Nevertheless, in 1949, he didn’t object when Jean Mitry’s award-winning film Pacific 231, a tribute to the steam locomotive, used the work as its soundtrack.
Villa-Lobos: The Little Train of the Caipira, 1930
Part of Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No 2, The Little Train of the Caipira colourfully replicates the sounds of an ageing and rusting steam locomotive as it gradually stutters its way up to full speed across the Brazilian plain. Train music from the first-class compartment.
Britten: Night Mail, 1936
In 1936, Britten and the poet WH Auden were commissioned to provide music and text for the GPO documentary Night Mail. The film records the transport of mail by train from London, through the English shires and the industrial north, to early morning in rural Scotland and finally to Glasgow. To create the effect of a steam locomotive accumulating energy with the pistons driving the wheels, Britten utilised a most unorthodox percussion section, which included “Steam”, “Rail”, “Siren” and “Coal falling down shaft”. His research involved a freezing night on a railway platform. Dvořák, no doubt, would have loved it.
